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This paper studies the long-run mortality effects of in-utero and early-life economic conditions. We examine how local economic conditions experienced during the Great Depression, proxied by county-level banking deposits during in-utero and first years of life, influence old-age longevity. We find that a one-standard-deviation rise in per capita bank deposits is associated with an approximately 1.7 month increase in males' longevity at old age. Additional analyses comparing state-level versus county-level economic measures provide insight on the importance of controlling for local-level confounders and exploiting more granular measures when exploring the relationship between early-life conditions and later-life mortality.

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The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the critical importance of intensive care units (ICUs), a field institutionalized by Bjørn Ibsen during the 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen. Ibsen's groundbreaking innovations, including positive pressure ventilation and real-time physiological monitoring, laid the foundation for modern intensive care medicine. Trained in Denmark and the United States, Ibsen demonstrated the effectiveness of manual ventilation during the polio outbreak after successfully resuscitating a young patient, Vivi Ebert, which in turn led to the creation of the world's first multidisciplinary ICU at Blegdams Hospital. This article explores the historical context and significance of Ibsen's contributions, tracing the evolution of the physiology of breathing from the early concepts of Vesalius and Hook to the widespread application of ventilation techniques. The establishment of the ICU introduced new ethical dilemmas, highlighting the delicate balance between prolonging life and maintaining patient dignity. Ibsen's legacy extends beyond medical advancements to the compassionate care he championed, a principle that remains a cornerstone of modern intensive care. This ethical complexity is a crucial aspect of the history of intensive care medicine.

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Kenneth Keown, MD, was a forward-thinking anesthesiologist who developed techniques to allow the safe practice of cardiac anesthesia and opened the door for the future development of more complex intracardiac surgical procedures. His early successful protocols for cardiac anesthesiology and his wide-reaching education of others on these methods earned him the designation of "the grand old man of anesthesia for inside-the-heart surgery" at a young age. His contributions also extended to groundbreaking research in hypothermia, lidocaine uses as an antiarrhythmic, and advocacy for anesthesiology as a specialty. We highlight the accomplishments of Dr. Keown that may be unrecognized by those outside the field of cardiac anesthesiology, as they paved the way for the success of modern cardiac surgery.

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The landscape of healthcare in rural India has long been characterized by challenges that include accessibility, affordability, and cultural acceptance. Among these difficulties, the story of Dr. Rajnikant Arole and Dr. Mabelle Arole stands out as a beacon of hope and innovation. Their work in the rural areas of Maharashtra not only transformed the health outcomes of the local population but also set a precedent for community-based healthcare initiatives worldwide.

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Henry Norman Bethune was a prominent Canadian thoracic surgeon who came to fame during the 1930s. After being made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Bethune became head of thoracic surgery in a hospital in Cartierville, Canada. During this time, he pioneered surgical techniques, published research findings, and invented surgical instruments. Not content with being only a physician, innovator, and humanitarian, Bethune also found himself in medical services on the frontlines of wars in both Spain and China. In Spain, Bethune emphasized the need for prompt blood transfusions and developed mobile blood transfusion services. After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Bethune traveled to China and quickly organized a mobile operating unit. Following discussions with Chinese leaders, Bethune performed surgeries on the frontlines of conflict in northern China, where his exceptional loyalty to duty became famous throughout the region. Although he met his end at an early age due to septicemia in 1939, his medical legacy carries on in multiple countries and serves to inspire a future generation of medical practitioners.

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Following the discovery of the least squares method in 1805 by Legendre and later in 1809 by Gauss, surrogate modeling and machine learning have come a long way. From identifying patterns and trends in process data to predictive modeling, optimization, fault detection, reaction network discovery, and process operations, machine learning became an integral part of all aspects of process design and process systems engineering. This is enabled, at the same time necessitated, by the vast amounts of data that are readily available from processes, increased digitalization, automation, increasing computation power, and simulation software that can model complex phenomena that span over several temporal and spatial scales. Although this paper is not a comprehensive review, it gives an overview of the recent history of machine learning models that we use every day and how they shaped process design problems from the recent advances to the exploration of their prospects.

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Dr. Scheffer Chuei-Goong Tseng is widely recognized as a pioneer in the development and application of cryopreserved amniotic membrane therapy. Dr. Tseng has completely revolutionized the management of ocular and various diseases through the success in the study of regenerative medicine, specifically through the human amniotic membrane. He has turned innovative scientific discoveries into products that contribute to many medical fields, including ophthalmology, orthopedics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, dermatology, and wound care. This review article explores Dr. Tseng's background, career, and significant contributions to regenerative medicine, with a particular focus on the impact of cryopreserved amniotic membrane technology.

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BACKGROUND: The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt conducted an expedition through the American continent, alongside Aimé Bonpland, from 1799 to 1804. Before finally returning to Europe, they decided to take a side trip to the USA between May 20 and July 7, 1804. Humboldt's most detailed account of his time in the USA consists of a manuscript entitled "Plantae des États-Unis" (1804), containing information on useful plants and timber of the country. The aim of this paper is to retrieve, for the first time, ethnobotanical information regarding North American plants and their uses inside this Humboldt's manuscript as well as to highlight the erasure and invisibilization of North American Indigenous knowledge within historical documents and bibliography, mainly during the nineteenth century. METHODS: "Plantae des États-Unis" (digitized version and its transcription) was carefully analyzed, and information on plant species mentioned in the manuscript (including botanical and vernacular names, traditional uses, and general observations) was retrieved. Traditional uses were correlated with ethnobotanical data from the Native American Ethnobotany Database and encyclopedic literature on North American plants from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as recent pharmacological studies searched in scientific papers. RESULTS: In the manuscript are mentioned 28 species distributed in 15 botanical families, with Fagaceae (9 Quercus species) being the most representative. All species are USA natives, except for one undetermined species (only the genus was mentioned, Corylus). Four species were directly mentioned as medicinal (Toxicodendron radicans, Liriodendron tulipifera, Actaea racemosa, and Gillenia stipulata), while other four were described as tanning agents (astringent) (Cornus florida, Diospyros virginiana, Quercus rubra, and Quercus velutina). Two species were described as bitter (Xanthorhiza simplicissima and A. racemosa). Nine Quercus species were described, but five were reported as the most useful oaks for cultivation in Europe (Quercus bicolor, Quercus castanea, Quercus virginiana, Quercus michauxii, and Quercus alba); three of them were used for ship construction (Q. virginiana, Q. michauxii, and Q. alba), two as astringent (Q. rubra and Q. stellata), and one had wood of poor quality (Quercus phellos). One species was described as a yellow dye (Hydrastis canadensis), and the other was mentioned as toxic (Aesculus pavia). Ten species did not have any useful applications listed. CONCLUSIONS: Although "Plantae des États-Unis" is a brief collection of annotations, these data reveal a historical scenario of outstanding plants with social and economic interest in the USA at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The data highlight a clear process of suppression of the traditional knowledge of Native North American Indigenous peoples in past historical records and literature, due to the lack of acknowledgment by white European settlers and American-born explorers. This ethnobotanical inventory may help us understand the relationship between plants and Native North American Indigenous peoples, as well as European naturalists and settlers, and USA-born people in the past, and reflect on the importance of Indigenous traditional knowledge, bioeconomy, sustainable management, and conservation of biodiversity in the present and future.

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In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Shanti Teresa Lakra, a committed Indian medical nurse, has made a major impact on public health. Lakra, who was born in Rangat on May 1, 1972, was motivated to become a nurse by her elder sister. Her work with the Onge tribe has earned her recognition, particularly in the wake of the 2004 tsunami that destroyed their settlements. Lakra has devoted her professional life to enhancing the health of these indigenous people and averting their extinction by working with particularly vulnerable tribal groups. When she started her work, there were just 78 Onge people living there. She worked constantly to improve healthcare and education, and in five years, the population grew to 100. Her effort required overcoming socioeconomic obstacles, linguistic limitations, and the tribe's initial apprehensions. Despite hazardous circumstances, Lakra helped by immunizing the Jarawa tribe during the COVID-19 outbreak. Her efforts have been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Florence Nightingale Award and the Padma Shri. Her legacy is marked by her empowerment of tribal communities, her role as a healthcare role model, and her advancements in public health in remote areas.

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The debate between the revisionist and received views of the relationship between Thomas Kuhn and logical empiricism has until now focused on the relationship between Kuhn and Rudolf Carnap. Here, I consider the relationship between Kuhn and two other members of the Vienna Circle's left-wing; Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank. It is argued that the attribution of the historical turn in philosophy of science to Kuhn obscures the historical awareness displayed in important works by members of the Vienna Circle, and thereby distorts its legacy. Both Frank and Neurath recognised the role for history in theorizing about science, and drawing upon these insights lead them to considerations of scientific theory-choice, rational disagreement, and the role of extra-scientific values in science, that anticipate those later made famous by Kuhn. It is also argued that the Left-Vienna Circle's programme for Unified Science, the replacement of traditional philosophy with a bipartite metatheory of science, provides a clearer and potentially more radical role for the history of science within the philosophy of science than Kuhn's. To reach this conclusion, it is demonstrated that some members of the Vienna Circle maintained a far less robust distinction between contexts of discovery and justification than has typically been attributed to them.

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The 'postcode lottery' has become a dominant political framing for place-based health inequalities in Britain, used by patient groups, politicians and in media coverage of regional health and healthcare inequalities. Using newspapers, parliamentary material and health policy documents, this paper traces how this term has changed and expanded from its origins as a protest about access to new pharmaceutical treatments, to a broader commentary about geographical variations in the quality of NHS and other public services, health outcomes, and deprivation. It traces this emergence and evolution from its origins in the 1989-91 introduction of the 'internal market' and the 1994 reintroduction of the National Lottery, through to New Labour health reforms, the introduction of austerity, and the Levelling Up programme in the present day. This paper finds that the term's concern with unfairness has enabled its incorporation into a range of political positions, both as a defence of universalism against market-based reforms in the NHS, and to rationalise distinctions between 'unequal' and 'unfair' disparities in health outcomes. We conclude that understanding and addressing place based differences and inequalities in health, healthcare, and health outcomes may be aided through investigation of cultural ideas and values as well as the deep histories of place and local services.

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Historical resurveys represent a unique opportunity to analyze vegetation dynamics over longer timescales than is typically achievable. Leveraging the oldest historical dataset of vegetation change in the Bavarian Alps, Germany, we address how environmental conditions, vegetation composition, and functional diversity in the calcareous grasslands of the Schachen region have changed across different elevational ranges over an 83-year timeframe. We document changes in regional average temperature and precipitation. We use indicator values (IV) for species' ecological preferences and their palatability to grazers to infer local conditions (temperature, soil moisture/fertility, and grazing regime). We further estimate changes in temporal beta-diversity and functional trait community composition between historical (1936) and contemporary (2019) surveys in two elevational (subalpine and alpine) belts. Both subalpine and alpine sites became drier; subalpine sites also became warmer with more palatable plants. Species occurrence and abundance in the Schachen region has not changed substantially over time despite changing macroclimate and local environmental conditions under anthropogenic change. Yet these grasslands have experienced several "invisible" changes in functional composition over the past 80 years. As the Schachen has become drier, species with traits related to drought tolerance and animal-based dispersal have increased in dominance. Specifically, in alpine sites, community-weighted means revealed that with low fecundity, higher potential for endo- and epizoochory (seed dispersal via animal gut and fur, respectively), higher foliar frost tolerance, and deeper dormancy increased in dominance. Similar trends were found for increasing dominance of low fecundity, epizoochorous species in subalpine sites. Vegetation data from resurveying historical plots in combination with changes in local conditions, classic biodiversity indices, and functional trait indices can provide more holistic insights into changes in the environment and potential impacts of those environmental changes on long-term plant community and functional diversity.

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There is general consensus among evolutionary biologists that natural selection drives phenotypic modifications within populations over generational time. How to reconstruct this historical process, however, has been discussed mostly in theoretical terms, and recommendations and explanations on how to translate such theoretical insights into practice are needed. The present study aims at providing a theory-supported practical guide on how to reconstruct historical evolutionary processes by applying a morphology-centered approach through a series of interdependent steps of descriptive morphology, functional analysis, ecological observation, integration of paleoecological data, and evolutionary synthesis. Special attention is given to the development of tests regarding the accuracy, closeness to reality, and plausibility of the hypotheses at every level of the reconstructive process. This morphology-centered approach had its beginnings in the wake of the evolutionary synthesis and is part of the scientifically necessary process of reciprocal testing of hypotheses generated by different methods and data for the reconstruction of evolutionary history.

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Chaikhwa Nani Nelson, born on February 11, 1992, in Tutume village, Botswana, is a remarkable figure in oncology nursing who has transformed personal adversity into a driving force for change in cancer care. Diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 2013, she faced the life-altering challenge of undergoing a lower limb amputation and enduring the rigors of chemotherapy. Despite these hardships, Chaikhwa's resolve to support others battling cancer only strengthened. Her journey led her to become an oncology nurse, where she tirelessly advocates for patient-centered care and the need for compassionate healthcare professionals. Chaikhwa's efforts have been recognized internationally, with accolades including the Mandela Washington Fellowship, the Queen's Young Leader Award, and a prestigious Chevening Scholarship, through which she earned her MSc in Clinical Oncology. She founded Botswana's first cancer support group, providing much-needed resources and community for patients and their families. Chaikhwa Nani Nelson's story is a testament to resilience and dedication, making her a pioneering leader in oncology care in Botswana.

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Upendranath Brahmachari (1873-1946) was a prominent Indian scientist and physician renowned for his groundbreaking work in tropical medicine. He is most famous for discovering urea stibamine, a highly effective treatment for kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), a deadly parasitic disease. This discovery had a significant impact on public health, saving countless lives in India and beyond. Born in Jamalpur, Bihar, Brahmachari pursued medical education at the University of Calcutta, where he later became a professor. His dedication to medical science earned him numerous accolades, including a knighthood in 1934. In 1929, Brahmachari was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of his work on urea stibamine. Although he did not win, the nomination underscored the global significance of his contributions. In addition to his scientific achievements, Brahmachari was active in public service, advocating for improved healthcare and medical education in India. His legacy continues to inspire medical professionals and researchers worldwide.

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Collective memories refer to a group's shared representation of the past, which are slow to change over time. In this study, representative samples of American and German Younger Adults (YAs) and Older Adults (OAs) rated the emotional valence of 12 national historic events. Critically, both age groups were also asked to take on the perspective of the other: OAs imagined how YAs feel, whereas YAs imagined how OAs feel about the same events today. The results replicated previous findings that OAs and YAs hold differing opinions on numerous events. Both age groups successfully recognised these different collective perceptions between generations to some extent. Yet, OAs were more accurate in the perspective-taking task, with YAs consistently underestimating the intensity of OAs' emotional valence. Self-reported perspective-taking strategies suggest that OAs relied more on stereotypes and considered education, while knowledge from specific people was universally used to rate the other age group's perspective.

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BACKGROUND: A lack of a "gold standard" operationalized index to measure structural racism (SR) in the current literature limits the comparison of the evidence available. This study aims to synthesize the measures of SR from the current literature to identify the measures used to date, study the indicators included, and investigate its expanding domain. METHODS: A literature search of original quantitative studies in the Google Scholar and PubMed databases for articles dated January 1, 2000-July 31, 2023, was conducted with search terms: ["Institutionalized Racism" OR "Systemic Racism", OR "Structural Racism"] AND "Health" AND "United States." The studies were summarized and extracted based on the type of SR index used, the domains of SR incorporated, and the health outcomes studied. RESULTS: A total of 74 articles were included in the final review. The historical redlining score, G-statistics, index of concentration, and structural racism index were common quantifiable measures of SR. These indices capture 56 indicators across 11 significant domains to measure SR. Similarly, SR indices are being used mostly to study the impact of SR on cardiovascular diseases and other chronic health conditions, women's and maternal health-related issues, and COVID-19 outcomes. CONCLUSION: Multiple indices have been developed to capture SR, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have observed an increased interest in understanding health disparities through the lens of SR. With the rise in evidence on experiences of minority races related to racism, there is a high need for a standard approach to measuring SR.

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David Taylor-Robinson has been an inspiration to many investigators in the field of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as, arguably, the father of modern mycoplasmology. Born in 1931, his career as a physician-scientist was initially in virology, researching chickenpox and the common cold, for both of which he made key discoveries at a time when little was known about these conditions. Soon, however, David's attention turned to bacteriology, developing a passionate interest in mycoplasmas and chlamydia. This gave rise to research collaborations all around the world in marginalized and regional communities, stretching from Tristan da Cunha and Antarctica to the South Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa. He was the discoverer of Mycoplasma genitalium, which today is a commonly diagnosed and increasingly antibiotic-resistant pathogen of the genitourinary tract and a significant cause of female infertility. His problem-solving mindset led to research on associations between mycoplasmas with rheumatological conditions and chlamydia with coronary artery plaque formation late into his working life. Throughout his distinguished career, David Taylor-Robinson, affectionately truncated to "DTR" to all who knew him professionally, has been a beloved mentor to hundreds of aspiring scientists, some of whom are now leaders in their field. His open-door policy meant that there was rarely a time when there was no visiting researcher from each of the six inhabited continents under his expert tutelage. A strong work ethic and drive for scientific excellence, allied to his unstinting kindness and jovial demeanor, has provided a source of inspiration to a wide diaspora of research colleagues over more than six decades. This is as much David's legacy to medical science as the undoubted public health impact of his own pioneering research on STIs.

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Dr. Manuel Martinez-Maldonado is a distinguished Puerto Rican internist, nephrologist, physician-scientist, mentor, and prolific writer whose leadership in academic and clinical settings has significantly advanced the fields of nephrology, renal physiology and pharmacology, fluids and electrolyte metabolism, calcium metabolism, hypertension research, and medical education. His research on electrolyte imbalances has led to innovative hypercalcemia treatments, notably furosemide with IV fluid therapy. This is an approach that, combined with pharmacotherapy using calcitonin and bisphosphonates, became the standard practice for managing hypercalcemia until specific therapies became available. His nephrology research team and laboratory in the San Juan VA (Veterans Affairs) Medical Center and the Medical School of the University of Puerto Rico were internationally renowned. Throughout his career, he fostered a culture of mentorship while spearheading superb clinical teaching and research initiatives. His transformative tenures at several institutions, including Baylor College of Medicine; the University of Puerto Rico-Medical Sciences Campus; the VA medical centers in Atlanta, Houston, and San Juan; Emory University; Oregon Health Sciences University; Ponce School of Medicine; and the University of Louisville School of Medicine demonstrate his lasting contributions to medical science and education. His interdisciplinary approach, advocacy for kidney and clinical research, and contributions to understanding the renin-angiotensin system and the role of sodium-potassium-activated adenosine triphosphatase in renal concentration mechanisms illustrate his enduring impact on renal physiology and human health.